Another Wonderful Story From The Pinnacle Of Morality - The Old Testament

Oh God, You devil you.

 

It's sordid tales of graphic sex and violence like this that may make some parents wonder if they should be letting their kids read the Bible. Putting aside the sex, blood and gore, though, it may be useful to ask what this story is really about and how it ended up in scripture. First of all, we need to identify the genre. The anonymity of the characters and direct dialogue have the quality of a folktale, as opposed to something that actually happened; and despite the amoral/immoral nature of the plot and characters, it has a moral of sorts--in the broad sense of a lesson. Let me take a stab. I'm assuming that the story was written, not by God, but by scribes attached to the royal court in Jerusalem, during the early Iron Age or possibly the post-exilic period--possibly both, the latter building on the former. It's a story worthy of an Iron Age Quentin Tarantino, and must have held the attention of its audience as the tale was told around the campfires!

The author(s)s' full purpose (not God's, but the humans who wrote it down in the first place) may be lost in time, but details suggest several immediate objectives: (1) to champion Davidic claims to the monarchy against challengers: King Saul's descendants and the Benjamites; (2) to defend centralized government; (3) to illustrate the fundamental depravity of humans left to their own devices instead of God's law; and (4) to show that when Israelites disregard the rights of other Israelites it leads to disaster, but eventually, they'll come back together, because Israel must endure.

There are several passages in the Hebrew Bible that seem to reflect the views of conflicting sides in the struggle between the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Benjamin for the throne. Saul, Israel's first king, was a Benjamite from the city of Gibeah which figures so prominently in our story. Upon Saul’s death, the tribe of Judah made David their king, but the other 11 tribes of Israel followed Saul’s son Ishbosheth, a Benjamite. This led to a prolonged war between the forces of David and those of Ishbosheth. After the death of Ishbosheth, David was able to unite the tribes under his rule. There is speculation that the tale of the rape in Gibeah was Judaic propaganda to discredit Saul's followers and bolster David's.

Another possible purpose of the story is to advance the cause of the monarchists by showing the moral dangers of decentralization and anarchy. Supposedly, during the period of the judges, described in the Book of Judges where the story of the rape appears, Israel was ruled by local warlords, the judges. "In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit." (Judges 21: 25). The story of the Levite and his concubine illustrates what comes of such a situation. It begins pointedly with the reminder "Now in those days Israel had no king." (Judges 19:1).

More generally, the story continues the perennial biblical theme of the depravity and waywardness which beset humans when they are guided by their own instincts instead of moral law. All of the characters seem to be morally off kilter. Should a Levite have a concubine? Leviticus 21"7 suggests not. Was the concubine guilty of any wrongdoing? Here there seems to be a difference between the Septuagint and the Masoretic versions, the former indicating that the woman left the Levite in anger and returned to her father's home, the latter suggesting she went off the reservation and "played the harlot". Judges 19:2 (KJV) Anyhow, the Levite went after her to try to win her back, which he did. But on the way home, with night approaching, they had to stop somewhere for rest, and that's when he made a fateful mistake. Instead of stopping off at Jebus, which was in the territory of the Jebusites, who were foreigners, he opted to stay in Gibeah, controlled by his fellow Israelites. This is important for understanding the point of the story--and there is one.

Anyone at all familiar with the Bible should by now have a certain feeling of deja vu. Strangers stopping in a strange city. Taken in by a kindly host. The usual local mob of roving homosexual gang rapists showing up at the door asking to get to "know" the Levite better--know in the biblical sense (yada). Sounds like Sodom. And that's the point. Gibeah=Sodom, only with a twist. Sodom was supposedly a Canaanite city; Gibeah was the Israelite city of Saul and the Benjamites. To be continued.

 

As was true with Sodom, the story has nothing in particular to do with homosexuality. The mob was not there for sex but to degrade and humiliate an outsider, in violation of the most basic Israelite norms of hospitality to strangers. But in this case, the intended victim was a fellow Israelite from another tribe: a Levite from Ephraim. As in the case of Sodom, the host offers his virgin daughters and the concubine instead of the Levite. The Levite won't let the host give his virgin daughters to the mob, so he steps up to the plate and throws his concubine out the door (What a schmuck! Promise them anything, but give them my concubine) , to be raped by the mob--who unlike the Sodomites weren't picky about the gender of their victim. They rape her so savagely that she dies. Then the Levite is so enraged he chops her body up into eleven parts, and sends each to one of the other eleven tribes of Israel to show them what the Benjamites did. Obviously, this move is somewhat "over the top", even for a Bible story. In a modern court of law, such evidence would surely be excluded as inflammatory to the jury.

In this case, the recipients were properly inflamed, and swear never to let their daughters marry a Benjamite, and sent men to the tribe of Benjamin to demand the offenders be turned over. Instead, the Benjamites decided to stand by their fellow tribesmen, and Israeal's first civil war ensued in which the Benjamites were all but wiped out, especially the women, and faced with the prospect of not being able to take wives from the other Israelite tribes, were in danger of becoming extinct. The Israelites recognized that the extinction of one of their tribes would be a catastrophe. So naturally, their solution is another mass atrocity. They attack a city whose inhabitants had not taken the oath against marrying Benjamites, slaughtered everybody except the female virgins, and gave them to the Benjamites. But there weren't enough, so they abducted some more from a Canaanite village.

Some scholars think the story was written or reworked during the post-exilic period to emphasize how it all started because Israelites treated one of their own as an outsider, but despite seemingly irreconcilable differences, Israelites come together in the end. But the important message for gentiles is that in those days "everyone did what was right in his own eyes". And look where it got them. Somehow, all this gets lost in the cartoon, which seems to think the story is condoning bad behavior instead of holding it up before our eyes to show its consequences.

 

Thank you for your interpretation. The largest evils and biggest wars and atrocities and genocides have all been done by people who thought they were doing right. There is nothing divine about any of these books. They are all written by humans. The Bible is a survival guide for primitive war mongering sand people. They are still inciting wars and bloodshed and evils of all forms to this day, with no end in sight. That is the great hypocrisy of religious belief, "MY CULT is the only RIGHT CULT".

There are only wrong cults.

 

I partly agree. The greatest evils in history have been done by fanatics, religious, anti-reliigous or otherwise, who may have been well-intended or at least claimed to be. That goes for French Revolutionaries, Nazis, and Commies, as well as religious zealots. And I agree that the Bible was, not the "word of God" but the words of men inspired by God--inspired sometimes in the sense that an artist is inspired by a beautiful or stirring scene. The Bible is essentially an anthology, comparable to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, including books from a variety of different genres by a variety of authors from different periods of history, with different, sometimes contradictory, perspectives and agendas. For an excellent account of the human authors put it together and revised it, I'd recommend Karen Armstrong's The Bible: A Biography. It might seems strange that a Supernatural Being seeking to communicate His will to humans would chose to do so in such a form. I think the world's religious traditions are animated by a vision of a sacred realm beyond the the mundane, and that it's useful to study these traditions for insights into ultimate meaning.

The term "cult", if used as other than a pejorative for the other guy's religion, suggests mind control, excessive zeal and blind devotion to a charismatic leader. When I think of the folks in my Sunday school and bible study classes at the Methodist, Episcopal, and First Christian churches, the label doesn't fit. They're decent, congenial, tolerant and remarkably open-minded people who share my "progressive Christian" orientation that Jesus was all about peace, love and understanding. In fact, it wouild be hard to distinguish them from the freethinker group I also attend. We don't believe that our views are the right ones, although we also agree that some religious views are wrong and dangerous. Biblical inerrancy is one of those. I would object to the "sand people" designation for the war mongers, since it would be a stretch to fit Nazis and Stalinists under that rubric. Even Buddhism and Hinduism have their fanatics, as treatment of the rohingya jn Burma and Musims in India can attest. Religions and political ideologies can easily be perverted toward bad ends, and we must be on our guard at all times to resist this.

 

Yup, cults come in a sorts and sizes; religious sects, political parties, militaries... It is a cult if the rest of world is in agreement that a certain group or their leader is acting irrationality, fanatically and dangerously. Republican Trump supporters - prime example of cult mentality!